Has the digital backlash begun? Spike Jonze's "Her" and Wally Pfister's "Transcendence" both open this weekend, and while they're very different films — one with a nerdy guy falling in love with his sultry-voiced operating system, the other a mind-bending thriller about uploading human consciousness into a mainframe — they both view the digital utopia being promised to us by the technophiles with skepticism. In fact, "Transcendence" opens with the iconic image of a tablet being used as a doorstop; a piece of high-tech junk in a post-Internet future.
Pfister is Christopher Nolan's regular director of photography, and you can sense the connection all through "Transcendence." This film is Pfister's directorial debut, and he mines the same mind-game vein of Nolan's "Inception." It's part Frankenstein myth crossed with the quest to build an artificial intelligence (AI), but also borrows liberally from Philip K. Dick's "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch," in which an unwanted deity takes up residence in host bodies.
Johnny Depp and Rebecca Hall play Will and Evelyn Caster, a brainy power couple working in AI. They're the sort of digital proselytizers who might appear on the cover of Wired magazine.
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